[Bill Clinton arrives
in CartagenaColombia
on August 30, 2000 on the heels of three
unpublicized massacres by right wing paramilitaries designed
to inflame FARC guerillas. The real shooting and the American
publicity machine churning out war fever will start on
the
same day. This was the lead story in the June issue of "From
The Wilderness."]

While attention
is
being increasingly focused on a billion dollar military
aid package for Colombia that is nearing Bill Clinton's
desk for signature, experience - especially that taken
so
painfully from Vietnam - tells us that the real determinants
of how deeply involved we will become in Colombia are not
in Washington, but already down there stirring the pot.
As in Vietnam, and unlike the Contra War, Congress may
just
be playing "catch-up" with events created by various
interests serving more than one master. And experts are
becoming increasingly persuaded that our current Colombian
experience is more like Vietnam than anything since. The
likelihood of direct involvement of U.S. forces in a dense
hostile terrain, controlled by experienced, organized, well-armed,
indigenous forces, toughened by three decades of civil war
is growing daily. And indicators of the imminence of conflict
are not to be found in whether the Senate or the House chops
or adds a few dollars or helicopters which can all be restored
without fanfare to the Foreign Aid Bill in Conference Committee
at the last minute. They are to be found in the movements
and actions of money, the U.S. military and some CIA/DoD
connected corporations, possibly using "sheep-dipped" CIA
and military personnel disguised as employees of private
companies in roles that can only expand the conflict.

The money flow in
and around Colombia, both as connected to the drug
trade, to vast oil reserves and to the other abundant resources
accessible through the "back door" to the Amazon,
only hints at the financial and economic power accumulated
in the country. As FTW observed a year ago, the wealth
accumulated by the FARC guerrillas, largely through the
"taxation" of the drug trade, was sufficient
to
induce Richard Grasso, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange,
to travel to Colombia seeking investment funds for Wall
Street. That same wealth has made it possible, according
to MS-NBC, for FARC to purchase enormous quantities of
weapons
from the Russian Federation and have them delivered to
Colombia
in huge Il-76 transport planes. The rebel forces (both
FARC
and ELN), now controlling a third of the countryside, are
paying for the weapons with cocaine which is then flown
back, under the control of the Russian Mafia for sale in
Europe, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. The
model is not substantially different from that employed
by CIA protected assets and operations during the Contra
War of the 1980s except that there is no ideological mask.
And, as documented heavily by FTW (10/99), the proceeds
of Russian organized crime are increasingly finding their
way into profitable investments in U.S. banks like the
Bank
of New York or into Wall Street where history is again
affirmed
that the real power always profits from both sides of a
war.

To understand the
significance of this trade it must be noted that, in spite
of the continuing expansion of violence between the three
dominant factions (government, right wing paramilitaries
and rebels), all of which deal prodigiously in drugs, Colombia
has been able to steadily expand its drug production every
year for the past ten years. Now the largest drug producing
nation in the world, according to DEA and DoJ sources,
Colombia
produces almost all of the world's cocaine and almost two
thirds of all the heroin entering the United States. If
one imagines three rivals locked in a raging gun battle,
one wonders how or why they could all simultaneously increase
drug production at rates that would make major corporations
jealous. Clearly something else is operating here and that
is the hand guiding the huge accumulation of wealth resulting
from decades narco-expansion. That hand, we believe, is
the CIA. That accumulated drug wealth is what is attracting
the likes of major World Trade Organization advocates like
former Bush Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady and his Darby
Investments and multi-national giants like Philip-Morris,
which, at press time, has announced plans to purchase Nabisco
with some of the excess cash it has derived from laundering
drug money [See related stories this issue]. The other
key
to understanding the motive for a full regional conflict
in and around Colombia comes when one grasps fully that
the accumulated equity of decades of drug trafficking,
possibly
several trillion dollars, would be enough, if properly
focused
in a unified national economy to threaten United States
economic dominance in the Western Hemisphere and perhaps
the world. Better to have the country divided into warring
factions and incapable of focusing a unified national
will or acting as a regional lynchpin to lead other South
American nations in opposition to the re-colonization of
the region .

The Private Contractors

As noted by highly
credible writers such as Peter Dale Scott, Col. Fletcher
Prouty and even the legendary "retired"
CIA executive Ted Shackley in his book The Third Option,
the use of private corporations, whether directly owned
by CIA as "proprietaries" or not, is a common
practice for the extension of U.S. military and diplomatic
power. Examples of the former in Vietnam include Civil Air
Transport or Air America while examples of the later include
large multi-nationals such as Bechtel, Brown and Root, AT&T
or any of the major oil companies. In regions where overt
commitment of U.S. military forces is impolitic these private
corporations, as they have evolved in the last few decades,
can accomplish a multitude of objectives essential to inflaming
regional conflicts to the point where U.S. military forces
must be called in to save the day. The use of these companies,
which serve as actual profit centers for their private investors,
their intelligence agency owners, or both, has evolved to
the point where the corporations offer off-the-shelf war
making capabilities from infantry fighters, to aerial reconnaissance, to
general officers capable of setting up or commanding
division sized maneuvers in client countries. The survivability
of these companies is a priori tied to the creation of
conflict
and regional destabilization with the blessings of CIA
so
that there will always be customers. Peace becomes the
enemy.

One such corporation,
heavily involved in both Colombia and in Kosovo is the
Virginia
based DynCorp. DynCorp, according to Alex Cockburn and
Jeff
St. Clair, is the nation's twenty-second largest defense
contractor with 1998 U.S. Government contract revenues
of
$475 million. DynCorp, which currently has between 300-600
contracted employees in Colombia, is performing functions
like crop eradication (using defoliants - like Vietnam),
to sophisticated aerial reconnaissance, to combat advisory
roles training military and possibly even paramilitary
forces.
When the history of the Colombian War is written in may
well be noted that the first U.S. casualties were actually
three DynCorp employees killed when their reconnaissance
aircraft crashed on a mountaintop in the drug growing regions
last summer. DynCorp employees have been described as being
arrogant and more than willing to get "wet" by
going out on combat missions and engaging in firefights.
A British source reminded us recently that DynCorp Chairman,
Pug Winokur, begged out of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's
ill fated last flight in the Balkans. The same Pug Winokur
is on the board of Harvard Endowments which had a behind
the scenes hand in destroying the economic research conducted
by former Assistant Secretary of Housing, Catherine Austin
Fitts in 1996. That research was beginning to illuminate
how the drug trade generates profits for Wall Street through
the subsidized HUD housing market where Harvard is a heavy
investor.

The second major
contracting firm active in Colombia is Military Professional
Resources, Inc (MPRI). MPRI has pre-positioned itself well
for contract work in Colombia and is very optimistic about
its prospects for contracts when the billion dollar military
aid package passes sometime this summer. It should be. It
also helped the Colombian government devise the three-phase
action plan that will be implemented when the aid package
is funded.

MPRI is not shy
about
the fact that it is a military company with many contacts.
As indicated by stories in the Dallas Morning News and
in
more detailed research by the Canadian based International
Network on Disarmament and Globalization, MPRI maintains
a database of 11,000 retired officers and enlisted personnel
able to work on temporary assignments in foreign countries.
MPRI spokesman, Lt. General Ed Soyster (U.S. Army, Ret.),
is not shy in boasting of his company's presence in Colombia
or it's ability to provide anything from a general
officer to consult on organization or a tank driver or
SAM
(surface to air) missile operator to provide training in
third world countries. And that is exactly what MPRI intends
to do when the aid package is approved.

Asked for his opinions
about "outsourcing" as the process of hiring military
personnel through private companies is called, Drug Czar
and former head of U.S. Southern Command, Barry McCaffrey
said, "I am unabashedly an admirer of outsourcing…
There's very few things in life you can't outsource." This
sounds like a reasonable position for McCaffrey to
take since he will lose his job as Drug Czar next January
and find himself on the open market just as things in Colombia
begin to respond to an increased U.S. military presence.
FTW is fairly confident that he has his resume in with
at
least two firms already.

The problems with
outsourcing are acute and obvious. First there is the question
of accountability. Reports from within Colombia indicate
that the American contractors are behaving with impunity
as if they were, as is widely believed, working for the
CIA anyway. What is to prevent these private employees
from
committing acts of aggression that would cause an instant
uproar if committed by American troops? This is the classic
case of deniability and, as documented by Peter Dale Scott
in his CIA suppressed 1970 book The War Conspiracy, the
history of Southeast Asia, especially in the period from
1959 to 1963 is fraught with instances where CIA proprietaries
or contractors engaged in actions that widened and
inflamed local conflicts into regional conflicts. What better
position to be in than a position where, virtually immune
to congressional oversight, it would be possible to create
as much business as your company could handle. This of course
is advantageous for firms as large as DynCorp and MPRI which
trade on Wall Street and have board members "interlocked"
with other major defense contractors who stand to benefit
from widened conflict. A second problem with outsourcing
is command and control. FTW has always taken the position
that the tail wags the dog on foreign policy - that foreign
policy is directed and created to serve corporate and financial
interests. Historically, the military has served,
aside form being the direct administrator of key aid, as
a political entity in its own right and a balance of sorts
to corporate gluttony or, as Scott so eloquently described
in The War Conspiracy, another key player in "a floating
crap game" that all sides seek to protect while none
are able to control its eventual size or direction.

The Military

Last October President
Clinton issued pardons to a number of convicted Puerto
Rican
FALN terrorists and sent them home. This was unusual because
the terrorists were bombers who had killed several people
during the 1970s and were serving time in New York prisons.
While criticism of the pardons focused on Hillary Clinton's
run for the U.S. Senate in New York, FTW reported to you
accurately (10/99) that the move was really a bargain being
struck between Clinton and Puerto Rican nationalists to
provide for the safety of U.S. military forces as they
prepared
for direct U.S. involvement in Colombia. After the 1999
loss of permanent bases in Panama the closest (and only)
remaining U.S. facilities capable of supporting a Colombian
intervention are in Puerto Rico. In unpublicized testimony
before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control
on September 21, 1999, Southern Command Chief, Marine General
Charles Wilhelm stated that, "…U.S. Southern Command
must compensate for the loss of U.S. bases in Panama by
creating an alternative theater architecture that will support
efficient, effective and flexible CD [Counter Drug] operations
into the 21st century. Puerto Rico has replaced Panama as
the focal point of our theater architecture. U.S. Army South
recently completed its relocation from Fort Clayton in Panama
to Fort Buchanan; Special operations command has displaced
from its garrison locations in Panama to its new home at
Naval Station, Roosevelt Roads. … Other forward deployed
elements of SOUTHAF [U.S. Air Force, Southern Command]
have
migrated from Howard Air Force Base to new locations in
Puerto Rico and Key West."

The Puerto Rican
activists who are fighting to keep U.S. Naval operations
off of the tiny island of Vieques understand fully that
they are slowing preparations for war.

And signs abound
that, like Vietnam, the coming war in Colombia will not
be confined to one country. In his testimony Gen. Wilhelm
commented at length on the effects of the Colombian narco-insurgency
on surrounding nations. He took special pains to lament
the power vacuum in Panama which, since the U.S. invasion
in 1989 has had no standing army. This is a great irony
now for the country with the most accessible land border
with Colombia and which is reportedly providing "unpoliced" safe
havens for FARC and ELN guerillas to train, rest and
equip without fear of Colombian cross-border pursuit. This
is EXACTLY the situation the developed under CIA control
in Cambodia and Laos from 1959 to 1975.

Just as the Vietnam
War involved North and South Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand,
Laos, Burma and China (not to mention the USSR) the coming
conflict in Colombia will involve Colombia, Panama, Venezuela,
Equador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica and perhaps every
nation in the hemisphere. In his 1999 remarks Wilhelm took
great pains to note the deployment or military forces around
Colombia
by neighbors including Venezuela
which has, in a gesture of independence, refused to allow
U.S.
military aircraft overflight privileges. That is not the
case in Ecuador
on Colombia's
western border where the Ecuadorian government is rushing
to help the USAF expand an air force base and debating whether
or not to make the U.S. dollar the country's official currency.
Throughout all of this the U.S. Military will assert its
presence and it will take advantage of a multitude of political
and combat environments to perfect its operational skills
and effectively re-colonize and de-populate parts of the
region. On May 23, 2000, as far north as Guatemala,
which borders Mexico,
General Wilhelm ordered 40 combat Marines into that country,
equipped with Blackhawk and Chinook helicopter gunships.
Their purpose: to fight drugs.

And lastly, tried
and true CIA-friendly politicians, are beginning to lay
the groundwork for direct intervention in Panama to
guarantee a Vietnam-like feeding frenzy. On June 9, while
covering Congressional hearings on the drug trade, Reuters
reported that, "'The war in neighboring Colombia against
well-armed narco-terrorist forces, financed through laundered
drug profits through Panama's banks is escalating and threatens
to spread through the region', said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher,
a California Republican. ' Panama does
not have an army, navy or air force. The Panamanian
government and its national police force have reputations
for corruption and inefficiency.'"

Thanks to our long
standing friendship with author and investigator Jonn Christian,
co-author of The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and
author of a forthcoming sequel to his original (1978) work
Fatal Connections: Linking the Kennedy and King Assassinations,
we know something more about Rohrabacher. And it fits all
too well into the Vietnam
mold. FTW is in possession of LAPD reports and Sand Diego
police intelligence files indicating that the diminutive
Rohrabacher, then just 20, was intimately connected with
armed radical right-wing CIA funded elements that had been
planning assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Bobby
Kennedy. In fact, Rohrabacher, then a young conservative
Republican, was at the Ambassador Hotel on June
5, 1968 the night that RFK was assassinated and
was interviewed by LAPD. That murder led to the eventual
election of Richard Nixon and the prolongation of the Vietnam
War for another seven painful, profitable years. The parallels
between Colombia
and Vietnam are
inescapable and unavoidable. After twenty-five years,
the passing of an entire generation, the forces that govern
us behind the scenes are poised to unleash another "floating
crap game" of profits, corporate expansion,
re-colonization
and even genocide. The one glaring and hope-giving difference
is that this time the war will be justified on the basis
of fighting not Communists, but drug traffickers - and
only
one gang of drug traffickers at that. We will see the American
people's willingness to accept this ploy when the children
of the bull market begin to die.